The Myth Behind the Meaning of Paul’s Words on Women and Childbearing

Sandra Glahn studies the record of an Ephesian goddess to aid our reading of a challenging passage.

The Artemis of Ephesus

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

As a female New Testament scholar, I simply do not have the luxury of avoiding 1 Timothy 2:11–15, where Paul, after stating that women should “learn in quietness and full submission,” claims they “will be saved through childbearing.” The “saved through childbearing” verse has been quoted to me by more strangers and (possibly) well-meaning acquaintances than any other, but one particular time stands out.

Nobody's Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament

Sandra L. Glahn (Author)

200 pages

$16.39

I don’t remember what context could have possibly made his statement appropriate, but one day about ten years ago, a young man said in a conversation about my teaching, “Well, you are saved through childbearing.” In this instance, I was in a position of authority over him, and I could tell that his “joke” sought to return me to my rightful place.

“Then I guess I am not saved,” I quipped back, knowing that his interpretation of this verse depended on my literal procreation. I also knew, unlike him, that my body was giving many signs that I might never bear a child. (As a side note, by God’s grace, I eventually did become somebody’s mother.)

My story provides a minute glimpse into the horrendous ways that women have been hurt by the misuse of 1 Timothy 2:11–15, and in the introduction to her recent book Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament, Sandra L. Glahn gives a heartbreaking picture of her experiences with infant loss as well as encounters with this text in cultures where it stands supreme in determining how women might participate in the church. She, like I, internalized messages about womanhood and how the worth of women is measured. There must be many arrows in our quivers, they say, and our ministries are in our homes.

Glahn, a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, sets up her book as one that will deconstruct these views carefully by attending to the historical context of 1 Timothy. By thoroughly examining early evidence about Ephesus and the goddess Artemis of the Ephesians, which involves some exciting myth busting, Glahn provides a better understanding of a terribly complicated passage. Her primary method throughout the book is to illustrate claims through the presentation of historical data, which later she analyzes in relationship with the biblical text.

An accurate picture of Artemis

Glahn’s first chapter addresses an important question that may well have crossed your mind: Do we really need another book on this passage? And why now? Glahn’s resounding yes comes from several directions. We need a “fresh look,” she says, for these reasons:

For most of church history, women were considered inferior to men by nature.
Evidence suggests that (despite the point above) women were active in the church throughout that time.
We have access to more information now through databases, inscriptions, and other archaeological evidence.
We can better evaluate information due to advances in the studies of inscriptions, ancient writing materials and practices, signs and symbols, and literary analysis.

The second chapter focuses on the city of Ephesus, Timothy’s likely location when he receives correspondence from Paul. Glahn begins with a survey of places where Ephesus appears in Scripture. Among the more prominent mentions comes in Acts 19, where Paul’s ministry led to the burning of magical books and an uprising. During the uprising, a cry rings out from the crowds, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (vv. 28, 34). Paul’s message about Christ threatened their devotion to the goddess—and the production of goods that accompanied their worship.

This summary of Glahn’s observations so far aligns with standard accounts, but where it diverges is in her characterization of the goddess. According to many, Artemis is a goddess of fertility and in some instances prostitution. In physical representations, her torso or chest is covered with what looks like eggs, and many think those eggs are her many breasts. As Glahn notes, some have also emphasized a connection between Artemis and the Amazons of Greek mythology. But what do ancient texts say about Artemis?

Something quite different.

Artemis, who is most often referred to as “Artemis of the Ephesians,” is “nobody’s mother.” She values virginity and at times fights to preserve her own chastity. Even so, Artemis—who watched her mother suffer through the traumatic birth of her brother Apollo—was understood to be a midwife. Women would pray that she either deliver them safely through the experience of childbirth or mercifully release them from its pain and suffering through the swift delivery of one of her arrows.

In these accounts, she is never associated with prostitution. As Glahn notes, prostitution was banned in Ephesus at this time. Each of these characterizations of Artemis from the literary sources is also corroborated by evidence from ancient epigraphs that Glahn presents in the next chapter. There she looks at various references to Artemis on buildings and monuments, among other things, and they present a similar picture of the goddess.

Though Glahn notes a relatively consistent portrait of Artemis in the literary sources and available epigraphs, the representations of Artemis in architecture and art are more varied. At times, she looks like an Amazon, a traditional beauty—adorned in jewels with braided hair. At other times, frankly, she looks strange, covered in ovoid shapes interpreted as breasts. But these images are not representative of different goddesses or divergent traditions. As Glahn notes, coins from that time period have one image of Artemis on the front and the other on the back. But the beautiful virgin hunter is certainly nobody’s mother, so what are we to make of those strange egg-like shapes?

Glahn lists a wild range of explanations, including bull testicles and deer canines, but lands on the idea that these shapes are a type of bead used in magical jewelry connected with the powers of Artemis of the Ephesians. With these many jewels she is depicted as both resplendent and powerful—an apt portrait of Artemis, as we have seen.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

The Artemis of Ephesus

Slogan and response

The final chapter, “Saved Through Childbearing,” explores how a more accurate picture of Artemis aids our interpretation of 1 Timothy as a whole—but especially 1 Timothy 2, where misconceptions of Artemis have influenced Christian understandings about how women participate in the church. Glahn understands 1 Timothy to be a (relatively subtle) polemic against Artemis. She demonstrates how language applied to Artemis appears more often and in different ways in Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus, and she connects various themes in those letters with evidence already noted throughout the book.

But she also makes arguments that go well beyond this relationship. She demonstrates why interpreters should consider 1 Timothy 2:11–15 as instructions to wives, not all women. As she argues, the prohibition on women “teach[ing] or assum[ing] authority over a man” means only that a woman should not “teach with a view to domineering a husband.” Though this is where Glahn’s arguments converge with typical discussions of the passage, her presentation of the issues is clear and connects with the broader thesis.

Among the more interesting proposals in this chapter is the idea that “A woman is saved through childbearing” was a saying or slogan among the Ephesians. If so, then Paul is repeating their assertion and then responding to it when he says, if “they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control” (1 Tim. 2:15, NRSVUE). Interpreters generally puzzle over the shift from the singular to the plural (i.e., “a woman is saved” if “they continue”), but as Glahn notes, positing a shift from slogan to response could address this issue.

Overall, this book is a remarkable resource for those who want to learn more about Artemis of the Ephesians in particular. It provides a thorough survey of ancient literature and some useful analysis. In this way, one of the book’s great strengths could also be seen as one of its primary weaknesses: At first, it seems intended for an informed lay audience, yet dozens of pages contain extended quotations from primary sources. At times, the discussions are also quite technical. It could be the case that I’ve misjudged the intended audience(s), but the distance in style and pitch between Glahn’s autobiographical introduction and her analysis of epigraphic evidence is significant.

It is also the case that some may be disappointed that the interpretation of 1 Timothy does not play a more sustained role in the book. However, to Glahn’s credit, the chapter that does consider the passage is quite long, comprising about one-fourth of the book. Even so, the analysis is primarily, though by no means exclusively, informed by Glahn’s assumption that Paul has Artemis of the Ephesians in mind throughout his composition, and this may not be so.

Madison N. Pierce is associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary. She is the author of Divine Discourse in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

- More from Madison N. Pierce

Inkwell

Writing as Pure Play

Raed Truett Gilliam

Old enough to once again create with childlike joy

Mountainous Landscape with River Valley & Castle by Jan Meerhout (1661)

IT STARTS AS PURE JOY. It starts with toy castles and soldiers taking shape from the blunt end of a crayon. It grows into hours spent after school writing out the scenes that formed while daydreaming in class. The words flow with a youthful inventiveness. It’s an Edenic scene. You are innocent, unashamed.

Then comes the luring hiss of a greatness that could be yours. It hinders the ease and inventiveness that used to come so naturally. At some point, you begin to pick up on the rules—the do’s and don’ts; the tired tropes to avoid. Eden is infiltrated. A voice whispers that literary god-likeness could be yours, knowing good writing from bad; great writing from simply good.

The purity of playfulness falls prey to a new presence in the garden: perfectionism. You see your nakedness now; the raw, naive, cliche-ridden writings you once never questioned. You feel embarrassed about it for the first time. You can do better, you have to do better. And Eden is lost.

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I wrestled with the meaning of Lewis’s famous quote, “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” I was nestled in the lower bunk of my childhood bedroom, buried in blankets and bathed in bright reading lamp warmth. I puzzled over the dedication to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield: how could one outgrow fairy tales? How can a favorite food ever stop being delicious?

And for a few years, I happily forgot that such a time could arrive. I sketched imagined world maps on corners of school notebooks, and became an expert at switching back-and-forth between mental scene-creation and classroom participation. The daily trip between the Vivaldi-themed school bell, and the settling in at my family’s laptop in our 8^th floor apartment in Lebanon couldn’t come soon enough.

I’d find my spot in the Microsoft Word doc titled something like The Great Adventure of the Kingdom and would be immediately transported to the Peninsula during a time of revolution—traced through an underground escape from goblins, or in training with the scorpion-master of the Desert. These were not places I invented; they were places I knew and explored; they are places I long to return to one day.

THESE EARLY BURSTS of writing were not entirely devoid of ambition—I knew publishing was a thing; someone had to take the Word document, print it, bind it, and sell it. I never read Eragon but knew the Paolini story, and the fact that it was possible for some kid to get published assured me that my efforts were serious, not just play.

Looking back, that dream of being a published author, though harmless on its own, was the serpent in the garden of those happy days. Every moment I spent thinking about how publishable my work was slithered away with the initial sense of innocent, playful creation. I don’t know how things could have gone any other way—it seems an inevitable part of the growth process towards actual good writing, and like many things, the way to more life is often a kind of death.

Most writers end up internalizing similar crippling messages over the years: “You have nothing original to say.” “That story’s been told a million times.” “No one cares about your opinion.” “You need to read more, wait longer, get more degrees, build an audience.” All the objections, both within and without, can shackle the freedom of storytelling. We find every reason not to go back to the maps and the drafts and the ideas of dragons in distant lands, and the calling is buried in the bill-paying and glad-handing of maturity.

And so my youthful dreams lay dormant in their strapped helplessness for a few years, as I attended to the business of early adulthood. But exactly a week after my college graduation, I found myself old enough, once more, to step into Fairyland in the midst of the foggy mountains of Vancouver, Canada.

IN THE SPRING of 2022, Malcolm Guite, poet-priest-scholar, had just wrapped up his lecture on the Poetic Imagination in the auditorium of Regent College. Staffers stretched out a couple mic stands in the aisles for questions. I had one burning on my mind.

Guite had just brilliantly articulated the symbolism latent in the Narnia stories. I felt awestruck at the magic, but the feeling soon gave way to an angst, which I shaped into a question: “Lewis drew on so many sources, and wrote on so many layers. Did he plan it all out ahead of time? Or did the inspiration strike him in the process of writing?”

The question behind my question: “How am I going to write anything a fraction as resonant as a medieval cosmologist?” Guite answered with a metaphor (I rephrase):

Think of your imagination as a kind of soil. Every book you read, every film you watch, every soul-stirring song you enjoy is like a leaf from a tree that falls to the ground, decomposing over time, adding its essence to an increasingly rich and fertile topsoil, created over many seasons. There may be seasons of apparent barrenness, where not much happens besides more and more soil-making, but one day, the seed of an idea will take root, and in a few short months, it will sprout into a beautiful sapling—the creative work, ready to bear fruit. Though it might seem like an artist created something in just a few short months, this work sprouts from a soil shaped by years of patient deep-work, living, and learning.

Which brings us back to death.

I RECENTLY WENT to a wine & cheese night hosted by friends in their Soho apartment. At the beginning of our evening, one of our number posed a question to the table: “Have you given up on achieving greatness?” This, to a room of mostly twenty-something Christians living in New York City, an environment literally running on the drive and grind of the dream-chasing demographic—from the immigrants who left their familiar Old World for a new kind of future, to today’s gentrifying yuppies inhabiting fashionable Brooklyn neighborhoods. We debated what greatness actually means, but very few were ready to admit total defeat in the face of our host’s question.

“You can be like God,” the serpent whispered in the garden, and whispers still today. And it is to this temptation that we must die—the way we connect our identity to output, our worth to the plaudits, our value to status. The artistic call is foolhardy—to dive all-in is to take on huge risk, vulnerability, and time in pursuit of something with no clear-cut outcome, no set path or real guarantees of any kind, so we grasp for some sense of control, some way of measuring our success.

But if this calling goes deeper still; if it feels like the impulse to create is how God has wired you; if this instinct to tell stories is known at a deep level—if it fills you with ‘God’s pleasure’—then to create in the image of the Creator is a matter of obedience. We can obey in less-than-ideal ways when we let our whims and illusory aims overtake how we go about our obedience (read Jonah for a reminder), but to grow in obedience is not to abandon the whole project. It is to submit the how to the One who is in control; to loosen our possessive grip on the reigns, to lay down our strategies for success, and to empty our hands and receive what he has to give. This is not wish-fulfillment, it is the fruit of constant death-to-self. As the French Catholic philosopher and priest, A.G. Sertillanges, writes in the preface to his essential book, The Intellectual Life,

Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing worthwhile.

THE STATE OF GRACE, the gift we have in Christ, is that we can completely let go of the outcome of our work—we don’t have to fight for our worth or the need to secure our tomorrows. The death that crept into the garden of creative play is swallowed up and the creative process becomes a collaborative prayer—an intimate conversation with the person and primary source behind all imagination.

By dying to our narrow definitions of success, our perfectionism, our plans for achievement, and our timelines, we are free to bring forth the fruit he has appointed for us to bear. It comes from him, in his timing, for his glory. And when we doubt, or are still in the thick of the long, little-to-show-for-it-years of small beginnings, take heart and know: “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” (1 Thess. 5:24 ESV)

Raed Truett Gilliam is a writer and filmmaker, and associate producer for Christianity Today Media.

- More from Raed Truett Gilliam

Church Life

How One Indonesian Church Is Fighting Food Insecurity

Philip Situmorang in Gunungkidul Regency, Indonesia

In the village of Kemadang, long dry spells threatened local farmers’ livelihoods until a church-led granary brought hope.

Agung Parameswara / Getty / Edits by CT

Standing in her rice field in the rural village of Kemadang along the southern coast of Java, 53-year-old Marni Mariani pointed to the dry soil at her feet. “This is the land that we will harvest in three weeks,” she said. Yet due to the lack of rain this season, two of her four rice fields have already failed.

She noted that she doesn’t sell the rice harvest from her plot, which measures 32 by 49 feet, but rather that the food is for her family to eat. “But sometimes if there is a famine and the harvest is small, we are forced to buy [rice] from outsiders,” she said. “That’s what burdens us here.”

Yet since 2020, Marni hasn’t needed to worry about buying rice at a high price. Her 70-year-old neighbor, Mbah Gepeng Harjo, also no longer struggles to buy the expensive seeds and fertilizer he needs to cultivate the rice fields that he tends to. (Mbah means “old man.”)

That’s because of an innovative church-run granary program created by local pastor Kristiono Riyadi of Kemadang Javanese Christian Church that seeks to maintain community food reserves, especially during times of drought. It provides a grain savings and loan program and a produce buyback program. It also sells seeds at an affordable price.

The granaries are a local solution to tackling food insecurity in Indonesia, a widespread problem facing nearly 1 out of every 10 Indonesians and that is only increasing as the climate becomes more unpredictable. The poverty rate in the regency of Gunungkidul, where Kemadeng is located, is about 16 percent, with about 6,000 families living in extreme poverty.

The church also sees their work as an outreach to share the love of God to the community by helping with some of their most basic needs.

“From the testimonies of members of the food granary who are of other faiths, they feel that the church provides care for all, not only thinking about themselves but also about others,” Kristiono said.

A source of relief for a dry land

Gunungkidul Regency has a tropical climate, with a topography dominated by karst hills, an area of irregularly eroded limestone with natural caves and underground rivers. The rainy season is short, lasting only during November. The residents grow mainly rice, corn, and beans.

Difficulties related to crop failures, limited water sources, and a long dry season caused by climate change have often left farmers in the area in need of outside assistance.

As the situation became direr in Kemadeng and other villages in Gunungkidul’s Yogyakarta Province, Kristiono held an agriculture workshop in early 2020 to help his congregants, most of whom are farmers. One of their top concerns was finding inexpensive and high-quality rice seeds.

“I suggested the idea to help the villagers by establishing this food granary,” Kristiono said. “The farmers want their rice harvest to be stored, and they want to easily get seeds at affordable prices. This granary not only fulfills their food needs throughout the year but also helps them during the long dry season.”

Kristiono explained that members of the program are required to store at least 10 kilograms (22 lbs.) of unhulled rice in the granary each year and can store up to 40 kilograms (88 lbs.). They can then borrow rice from the granary for daily consumption, special celebrations, or emergency situations. If they borrow the rice for celebrations, they need to pay it back with interest.

Beyond providing storage, the program has also become a way to economically support the farming community. During harvest season, the price of grain is low, but the price rises during off seasons, usually from July to October. So the church has decided to buy the farmers’ harvests, including rice, beans, and soybeans, at an above-market price. The grains are stored and then available on loan to members or for purchase for the community during the dry season. Members can buy it at a discounted price.

“Unduh-unduh, or harvest day, is held as an expression of gratitude to God for the harvest every year,” he said. The granary program “is economic development not only for the congregation but also for the surrounding community.”

A community-led program

Today there are three granaries, with two in the nearby villages of Planjan and Banjarejo, and together they serve 90 farmers, including some who are not Christians. On a February morning, two farmers stopped by the warehouse to buy rice seeds, while others came with rice to store.

The initial capital for the food granary came from the Presbyterian synod of which Kemadang Javanese Christian Church is a member. The goal was to provide food security for the community, not just the congregation.

The synod’s general secretary, Anugerah Kristian, said the synod gave 30 million Indonesian rupiah (about $2,000 USD) to underwrite the food granary in Kemadang as an economic stimulus. “We are providing the capital only as an incentive” to initiate the project, Anugerah stated. “The granary must involve its citizens or members.”

The granaries are financially viable, although the profits are very small, Kristiono said. Because the farmers return the crops to the warehouse, sometimes at an interest, Kristiono can sell the extra grain and use the small profit to buy other crops. The challenge, however, is if the harvest fails and farmers ask for an extension on the deadlines to repay the granary.

Anugerah emphasized that community participation is what makes the granaries a success. “Members of the congregation, community, and village government thought about their condition and the difficulties they experienced,” he noted. “The idea for the granary emerged locally and was carried out according to their situation, with the synod’s support.”

Marni, who has been a granary member since it opened and is also a member of Kemadang Church, said it has provided crucial economic assistance. “Water is difficult to obtain here, and sometimes the harvest is small, so we have to be economical in using the harvested rice,” she said. “If we lack seeds, then we have to buy from middlemen at a fairly high price. This is quite burdensome. But since the rice granary was established, we have been greatly helped.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the local government bought rice from the granary to distribute to the community.

Waldiyanto Harjo, a village official, expressed appreciation for the granary. “When this activity was launched, many villagers attended the event because the village head and other officials came,” he said. “It continues to function even though the village has not provided additional capital.”

Kristiono sees the granary as a way for the church to live out the gospel. “For me, this is a form of church care, as God’s Word says in Mark 12:31 to ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’” he said. “This is the real form of love. We are here realizing that with these granaries.”

- More from Philip Situmorang in Gunungkidul Regency, Indonesia

Culture

From Passion to the Pews, Major Conferences Inspire Local Worship

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Arena events serve as the proving grounds for new music.

Andrew Arrol / Unsplash

The 2024 Passion conference opened with a countdown video. The crowd of 55,000 students packed into Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta cheered with anticipation. What would the first song be? Who would lead it?

What was the Holy Spirit about to do?

Flashing lights and a drum track led into the opening of Elevation Worship’s “Praise,” with the chant, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” Worship artist Brandon Lake and a team of singers emerged on the stage.

After days of music and teaching, during the final session of the conference, attendees and leaders were surprised by a spontaneously extended worship session.

Most people don’t get to worship with a crowd of 55,000 on a regular basis. That immersive experience is one reason thousands of Christians travel to events like Passion, Worship Together, and Sing! each year.

These conferences also serve as settings where worshipers encounter and fall in love with new music. Though the stage production and arena energy isn’t replicable in their local contexts, the songs themselves are: Recent research found that worship leaders are more likely to use a new song if they encounter it at a live event.

These events are the latest iteration of practices that have a long history in the church: pilgrimage and temporarily gathered corporate worship. Christians in Europe during the Middle Ages walked miles from shrine to shrine to venerate saintly relics and temporarily adopt the monastic practice of living a life set apart for devotion and worship.

Before stadium sets and big screens with lyrics, 19th-century tent revivals attracted participants with passionate preaching and spirited music, which often fused new refrains set to folk tunes with hymns and traditional sacred songs to cultivate a more rapturous, affectively heightened atmosphere.

Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls refers to modern conference congregations as “pilgrim gatherings” and “eschatological communities” in her book Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community.

“Evangelical participants step outside the purview of regular religious authority and are invited to try out new kinds of religious identities forged in the crucible of intense spiritual experiences,” Ingalls writes.

Kristian Stanfill, worship pastor at Passion City Church, sees the massive temporary congregation at the annual Passion conference as a way of creating an “eschatological community,” a shadow of what believers will experience in eternity.

“We prayed for the reality of heaven to be a reality on earth,” Stanfill told CT.

Stanfill says that the planning team for this year’s Passion conference, held in January, felt an unusual sense of urgency and that leaders and participants showed up ready for revival.

“We sensed a different weight around this year,” said Stanfill. “Looking at the times we’re living in, we are seeing the enemy deceiving a new generation, convincing them to live for less. But their eyes are being opened to see that only Jesus offers abundant life. That’s why they fill up Mercedes-Benz Stadium to worship and seek God. They want something real, something that lasts.”

Halfway through the worship set on the final morning of the conference, Stanfill sensed a prompting to slow down and wait to move on from their new song, “Cry Out.”

“I don’t know why I started singing ‘Agnus Dei,’ it wasn’t a song we had in our pocket, but the students just took over,” said Stanfill. The crowd and the leaders on stage sang “Agnus Dei” for 20 minutes.

“We all just lost track of time. We all got lost in Jesus for those 20 minutes.”

The potential for spontaneous experiences is part of what makes conferences like Passion special. It’s also what drew pilgrims to the Asbury revival in 2023. These events can serve as spaces to experience the “one-heartedness” that has historically accompanied revivals, and the music used in these settings becomes linked to the intense communal experience of the event itself.

Passion is largely attended by high school and college students from across the United States. Other conferences like Worship Together and Sing! aim to reach worship leaders and church musicians. Recent research suggests that while streaming has changed the way worship leaders find new music, live events like conferences remain influential.

“I prefer to experience the song before I use it,” wrote one respondent to the 2022 Worship Leader Research survey, reflecting on why live events are so effective as spaces to experience and evaluate new music.

The survey found that 71 percent of respondents were likely to consider using a new song after encountering it at a gathering in-person.

“Live events help me see how a song is executed and how it’s used and people respond to it,” wrote another respondent.

Marc Jolicoeur, one of the members of the research team and an affiliate professor of worship arts at Kingswood University, observed that some worship leaders see conferences, concerts, and other in-person experiences as field tests for new songs.

“Leaders will say things like, ‘I want my congregation to experience what I’ve experienced,” Jolicoeur said.

Passion’s new album Call on Heaven includes live recordings of many of the songs used at the 2024 conference, including the 20-minute spontaneous “Agnus Dei.”

For those who were in the stadium during that morning session, the recording provides a way to relive the seemingly endless outpouring of song, complete with the shouts, cheers, and murmurs from the crowd. A video of that session spread on social media and attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube, who left comments about their in-person and online experiences of being inspired by the event.

“This moment changed me. I’ve always been a worshiper and have enjoyed rewatching this clip many times over the past 6 weeks,” wrote one commenter on YouTube.

Call on Heaven preserves some of the aural sensations of what it was like to be in the room filled with thousands of worshipers singing “Holy, holy are you Lord God Almighty.” But as most conference-goers know, the emotional high of these live events isn’t sustainable. So what does it look like to take the music associated with these events back to the local church?

“The reality is, most services are not an emotional high, and that’s not a deficiency,” said Hilary Ritchie, who serves as minister for worship and the arts at Hope Church, a Presbyterian (ECO) church in Richfield, Minnesota.

Ritchie’s church utilizes music by Passion, Elevation, and other popular artists, but she tries to look to her congregation and musicians rather than the live versions recorded at conferences when adapting the songs for her context.

“Some of these things aren’t transferable to a gathering of 175 people,” said Ritchie. “It’s so important to have a pastoral sense of your congregation’s worship voice. What does your congregation need?”

Ritchie pointed out that while there are some potential problems with looking to conferences as models for local churches, these gatherings are often the only opportunities church leaders have to participate in congregational worship as true participants, not saddled with the burden of management or leadership. And while she likes to look to other similar churches to see what their smaller teams might do with a popular song, visiting another church on a Sunday morning isn’t usually possible.

“We’re always working on Sunday mornings,” she said. “Sometimes a conference is the most expedient way to get you and your team to a place where they can worship together outside of the weekly service they lead.”

But large conferences aren’t just worship events, they’re also promotional vehicles for popular worship artists and brands.

Worship Together is owned by Capitol CMG (a subsidiary of Universal Music Group), and Passion is signed to Capitol CMG as well. Sing! features new music from the Gettys and affiliated artists. These conferences promote the music and artists they platform by showing their effectiveness in an arena of worshipers.

Church musicians have been adapting music from professional recordings for their churches for decades, so the challenge of tempering expectations about what a song can “do” in a setting far removed from an arena is not new. But when congregants return from a conference inspired, energized, and full of suggestions, leaders often end up fielding unrealistic requests.

“I do think everyone understands that I’m not a jukebox,” said Ritchie. “And when someone approaches me with an idea that won’t work for us, I try to pastorally ask about their experience. They feel like God was doing something as they experienced that song.”

Spiritual encounters at conferences and revivals can be catalysts for real transformation and renewal that benefits the local church. Singing with a congregation of thousands feels, for some, like the closest they will get to experiencing God’s throne room on this side of eternity.

“The singing church is a powerful thing,” said Stanfill, reflecting on his 19 years leading worship at the Passion conferences. “When we join and sing our faith together, it encourages the whole room. It reminds us that we are part of the kingdom, and part of a movement of God that is bigger than ourselves.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Theology

Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Russell Moore

The “cheerful prudery” of Ned Flanders has given way to vulgarity, misogyny, and partisanship. What does this mean for our witness?

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Getty

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

I guess Ned Flanders goes to strip clubs now.

Until this week, I hadn’t thought about the caricatured born-again Christian neighbor on the animated series The Simpsons in a long time. New York Times religion reporter Ruth Graham mentioned him and his “cheerful prudery” as examples—along with Billy Graham and George W. Bush—of what were once the best-known evangelical Christian figures in the country. Indeed, a 2001 Christianity Today cover story dubbed the character “Saint Flanders.” Evangelical Christians knew that Ned’s “gosh darn it” moral demeanor was meant to lampoon us, and that his “traditional family values” were out of step with an American culture this side of the sexual revolution.

But Ned was no Elmer Gantry. He actually aspired to the sort of personal devotion to prayer, Bible reading, moral chastity, and neighbor-love evangelicals were supposed to want, even if he did so in a treacly, ultra-suburban, middle-class North American way. As Graham points out, were he to emerge today, Flanders would face withering mockery for his moral scruples—but more likely by his white evangelical co-religionists than by his beer-swilling secular cartoon neighbors.

As Graham says, a raunchy “boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.” (This article you are reading right now represents something of this shift, as I spent upward of 15 minutes pondering how to quote Graham’s article without using the word boobs.)

Graham’s analysis is important for American Christians precisely because the shift she describes is not something “out there” in the culture but is instead driven specifically by the very same white evangelical subculture that once insisted that personal character—virtue, to use a now distant-sounding word the American founders knew well—matters.

Yes, part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.

Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that almost no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel about a sex robot.

Wilson, of course, cultivates a cartoonishly “Aren’t we naughty?” vibe not representative of most evangelical Christians. But the problem is the way many other Christians respond: “Well, I wouldn’t say things the way he says them, but …” In the same way, they characterize as just “mean tweets” Donald Trump attacking those claiming to be sexually assaulted by him for their looks or war heroes for being captured or disabled people for their disabilities or valorizing those who attack police officers and ransack the Capitol as “hostages.”

What’s worse is that evangelical Christians—including some I listened to pontificate endlessly about Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality (pontifications with which I agreed then and agree now)—ridicule as pearl-clutching moralists those who refuse to do exactly what they condemned Clinton’s defenders for doing, namely, weighting policy agreement over personal character.

In the midst of the late-1990s Clinton scandal, a group of scholars issued a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency,” which stated:

We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy.

Those words seem far more distant than a Tocqueville quote now.

Our situation today would be understandable in a world in which words that come out of a person don’t represent what’s present in the heart, or in a world in which external conduct can be severed from internal character. The problem is that such an imagined world is one in which there is no Word of God. Jesus, after all, taught us the exact opposite, explicitly and repeatedly (Matt. 15:10–20; Luke 6:43–45).

Ironically, some of the very people who advance the myth of a “Christian America,” in which the American founders are retrofitted as conservative evangelicals, now embrace a view that both the orthodox Christians and the deist Unitarians of the founding era would, in full agreement, denounce. From The Federalist Papers to the debates around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually every Founding Father—even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism—would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone were not enough to conserve a republic: Moral norms and expectations of some level of personal character were necessary.

Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not at all. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognized until now, though, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders not living up to the character expected of them and leaders operating in a space where there aren’t expectations of personal character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to find that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud because you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws.

That’s because no leader of any community, association, or nation is an abstract collection of policies. We select leaders to make decisions about matters that haven’t happened yet, or that might not even be contemplated. A dentist who screams profanities at opponents and promises a practice built around “revenge and retribution” and the tearing down of all the norms of modern dentistry is not someone you should trust with a drill in your mouth. How much more so when it comes to entrusting a person with nuclear codes.

Moreover, what conservatives in general, and Christians in particular, once knew is that what is normalized in a culture becomes an expected part of that culture. Defending a president using his power to have sex with his intern by saying, “Everybody lies about sex” isn’t just a political argument; it changes the way people think about what, in the fullness of time, they should expect for themselves. This is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called “defining deviancy down.”

Louisianans defending their support for a Nazi propagandist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan because he’s allegedly “pro-life” is not just a “lesser of two evils” political transaction. The words pro-life Nazi—like the words pro-life sexual abuser—change the meaning of pro-life in the minds of an entire generation.

No matter what short-term policy outcomes you then “win,” you’ve ended up with a situation in which some people believe authoritarianism and sexual assault can be offset by the right “policy platform,” while others believe that opposing abuse of power or sexual anarchy must necessitate being opposed to “pro-life.” Either way you look at that, you lose.

What happens long-term with your policies in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But consider also what happens to you. “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”

The Bible not only warns us about what character degradation—from immorality to boastfulness to heartlessness and ruthlessness—can do to the souls of those practicing such things, but also about the ruinous effect on those who “approve of those who practice them” (Rom. 1:32).

Ned Flanders is not, and never was, the Christian ideal. Personal piety and upstanding morality are not enough. But we should ask the question—if The Simpsons were written today and wished to make fun of evangelical Christians, would the caricature be someone inordinately devoted to his family, to prayer, to churchgoing, to kindness to his neighbors, to the awkward purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?

Would that change be because the secular world has grown more hostile to Christians? Perhaps. Or would it be because, when the secular world looks at the public face of Christianity, they wouldn’t dream to think now of Ned Flanders but only of one more leering face at the strip club?

If we are hated for attempted Christlikeness, let’s count it all joy. But if we are hated for our cruelty, our sexual hypocrisy, our quarrelsomeness, our hatefulness, and our vulgarity, then maybe we should ask what happened to our witness.

Character matters. It is not the only thing that matters. But without character, nothing matters.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

News

Wire Story

Southern Baptists Finally Name New Executive Committee President

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Seminary head Jeff Iorg steps in after multiple resignations, failed searches, and back-to-back interim leaders.

Jeff Iorg, Executive Committee president-elect

Adam Covington / Baptist Press

After more than two years of uncertainty and at times, chaos, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has a new president.

At a special meeting in Dallas, members of the committee—which oversees the work of the 13 million-member denomination in between its annual meetings—unanimously elected Jeff Iorg as its new president and CEO. The meeting was held in executive session, and Iorg’s election was announced in the early afternoon on Thursday.

Iorg, longtime president of Gateway Seminary, a Southern Baptist school in Ontario, California, is well respected in Southern Baptist circles for his steady and low-key approach to leadership. In a press conference following his election, Iorg said he would focus on earning trust in his new role.

“Organizational trust is earned by two things: sacrificial service and demonstrated competence,” said Iorg, 65, who will begin his new role in May, after Gateway’s school year ends. “You don’t gain trust by asking people to trust you. You gain trust by doing the right thing, serving sacrificially and demonstrating competence. And people trust organizations that do that.”

Iorg is the Executive Committee’s first permanent leader since 2021 and its third since 2018. His predecessor, Ronnie Floyd, resigned in October 2021 after a two-year tenure overshadowed by the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis. Floyd’s predecessor, Frank Page, resigned in 2018 for misconduct.

Finding a new leader for the committee was an arduous process.

Committee members had hoped to approve a different candidate—Georgia Baptist leader Thomas Hammond—in February, but Hammond withdrew at the last moment. In May of 2023, the committee voted down Texas pastor Jared Wellman, a former Executive Committee trustee, as a candidate for the top job. Some trustees had been concerned that Wellman had served as chair of the Executive Committee and was on the search committee before becoming a candidate.

Willie McLaurin, an interim leader for the committee, had been considered for the permanent job but resigned last fall after the search committee discovered he had falsified his resume, claiming degrees he did not earn.

Jonathan Howe, who has served as interim Executive Committee leader, will remain in that role until May, when Iorg begins serving as president.

Louisiana pastor Philip Robertson, who chairs the Executive Committee, called the search process “a long journey” when Iorg was announced as a candidate. Iorg’s election, he said, marked a “new day” for the committee.

“The way Southern Baptists have united around this nomination is something we haven’t seen in a long time,” he told Baptist Press, an official SBC publication. “I am extremely grateful to God for that.”

Iorg’s colleagues have applauded his move to the Executive Committee.

“He is exactly what we need as president of the Executive Committee at this historic moment,” Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press in February.

Unlike other Southern Baptist seminary leaders, such as Mohler, Iorg has operated largely out of the limelight during his 20 years at Gateway Seminary.“Jeff has managed to do a great job at Gateway Seminary while simultaneously avoiding the internecine fighting of the SBC,” said Ed Stetzer, dean of the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and a former Southern Baptist leader. “That probably makes him one of the few candidates who can unite all sides in 2024.”

Gateway has experienced slow but steady growth under his leadership. When he was named president of the seminary in 2004, the school had 696 total students and the equivalent of 403 full-time students, according to data from the Association of Theological Schools. In the fall of 2023, the most recent semester for which data is available, the school had 1,499 total students—the equivalent of 783 full-time enrollees.

https://twitter.com/pastor_adam/status/1770882544969420885

Iorg also oversaw a move from San Francisco, where the school had been known as Golden Gate Seminary, to Ontario, California, in 2016. According to Baptist Press, Iorg had asked the school’s trustees to begin searching for his successor as president last fall.

The newly elected president said he planned to fly to Nashville on Thursday to begin searching for a place to live. He also said he and his wife plan to buy a home in Portland, Oregon, where his wife’s parents live, and that he would likely spend much of his time as Executive Committee president on the road rather than in an office.

In his new role, Iorg will lead a committee facing fiscal and legal challenges. In recent years, the committee’s legal costs have skyrocketed in response to the denomination’s abuse crisis. At their last meeting, the Executive Committee approved a budget that included drawing on more reserves to make up a deficit.

The committee will also play a role in deciding the fate of a series of abuse reforms approved by local church representatives at the denomination’s annual meeting. Currently, there is no longterm plan to fund those reforms, which have stalled.

Giving to the SBC’s Cooperative Program, which funds international and national ministries, is down, and trust in the denomination’s leadership has been frayed in recent years.

Iorg said that as a seminary president, he has long benefited from the Cooperative Program and plans to enthusiastically promote it.

A former pastor and state convention leader, Iorg is the author of eight books and holds degrees from Hardin-Simmons University, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Ann, have three children and five grandchildren.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Must Social Service Providers Nix Their Faith to Receive Federal Funds?

Carl H. Esbeck

Rather than follow the equal protections secured in Supreme Court decisions, the Biden administration opted for a complicated and soul-killing alternative.

Joel Muniz / Unsplash

Nine federal departments have issued new regulations governing social service grants for a range of programs including drug rehabilitation; assisting penitentiary inmates reentering their communities; sheltering the homeless; aiding needy families with dependent children; settling refugees; and providing overseas lifesaving aid in response to natural disasters, war, famine, and public health crises.

The regulations take effect on April 4, 2024, governing tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. And they represent a threat to the many Christian ministries that have long provided these social services with the help of federal grants while maintaining their religious identity and mission.

Rather than follow the rule of equal treatment secured in recent Supreme Court decisions, the Biden administration opted for outdated and unwieldy alternatives that will entangle the government in the work of religious nonprofits offering social services.

Since the 1996 welfare reform enacted in the Clinton administration, faith-based organizations have been invited to compete on an equal basis for social service grants under the “Charitable Choice” act sponsored by former senator John Ashcroft.

At the time, it seemed foolish for federal grants to exclude community-serving organizations that were already embedded in depressed neighborhoods via churches and storefront outlets, and whose mercy workers were known to the poor and trusted by those they were serving. These ministries of hope had a holistic approach that proved especially effective for addressing certain afflictions.

Early in 2001, then-president George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to nurture the idea. The hope was that the office would expand on the number of social service programs that required all grant applicants to be treated the same, emphasizing in particular that there be no penalties on account of an applicant’s religious character.

The criteria for applicants was no longer Who are you? but rather, Can you do the job? And that job was the effective delivery of the program’s services. Whatever else that might be communicated of a spiritual nature was not only not the concern of the government but was something with which officials were not to become entangled.

The Obama administration continued the initiative largely unchanged, albeit under the altered moniker of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. This was a rare instance of bipartisanship, and President Barack Obama had to withstand some heat from his party’s progressive left.

Over the last 20 years, there have been major rulings by the US Supreme Court reforming the law of church-state relations and making it easier to direct government aid to the best-performing charities, without penalty for being religious. So long as the purpose of the aid was—from the government’s point of view—secular, such as education, health care, or social services, then the government was to steer its money to the most capable applicants.

For example, the high court has long said that a state may choose to fund only its K–12 public schools, but if a state wants to also help private schools, it must treat religious and secular private schools equally. Under the First Amendment, evenhanded aid to K–12 religious schools is not only permitted by the establishment clause, but to discriminate against such schools is now prohibited by the free exercise clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”).

Whether one deems this development good or bad, there is no denying that there has been a sea change in the inclusion of religious K–12 schools in government largess. This has spawned a school-choice surge in about half the states.

Those same First Amendment principles apply to social services. What became known as the faith-based “equal-treatment regulations” during the Bush administration were to be kept in line with developments at the Supreme Court.

These equal-treatment regulations now span nine federal departments, with big-money programs at the likes of the US Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Justice, as well as the US Agency for International Development.

Given the current trajectory of the high court permitting government to pursue school choice, any needed updating by the Biden administration of the equal-treatment regulations should have been straightforward. The simple path was for social service providers, secular and religious, to compete equally for grant funding. The government’s interest begins and ends with the effective delivery of the designated aid to the program beneficiaries, be it drug rehabilitation, housing, job retraining, or reducing domestic violence.

The regulations just released by the Biden administration, however, are not only not simple but soul-killing to faith-based social service providers.

First, the regulations distinguish between whether the aid is delivered directly to the provider or delivered indirectly by way of a voucher given to the beneficiary to be passed on to the provider. In actuality, the distinction makes no difference; the result is the same for purposes of the First Amendment.

It once made a difference because the Supreme Court, starting in the early 1980s, interpreted the establishment clause to allow indirect aid to religious schools. It was expedient for the court to entertain the fiction that when a voucher or other form of indirect aid first went to parents—who selected the school for their child—the aid was from the parent, not the state. But all concerned knew this was really government aid to private schools, including religious schools. That’s why the public-school lobby fought vouchers. In any event, today’s court has moved beyond this fiction, and so must the equal-treatment regulations.

Second, the Biden regulations require that any faith-based provider be monitored to ensure that none of the funding is used for “explicitly religious purposes.” This too is an artifact of the court’s cases from 25 years ago but is superseded by today’s free-exercise clause principle that faith-based providers be treated the same as secular providers. The specified monitoring of religious providers will entangle church and government in ways inimical to our heritage, which rightly separates the two.

More fundamentally, the rule prohibiting aid for explicitly religious purposes is asking the wrong question. The proper inquiry is whether the provider, secular or religious, is doing the job of effectively delivering the program’s services. If the answer is in the affirmative, the government has received full value for its funding and its interest comes to an end. As noted above, the free exercise clause no longer allows discriminatory treatment of religious providers.

Third, if a grantee is faith-based, then the Biden regulations provide that a beneficiary may raise a religious objection to any part of the social service program and demand an adjustment.

Consider the impossibility of operating a religious K–12 school that must allow each of its students to pick and choose from its educational program, where students can opt out from any part of the curriculum that they find religiously objectionable. In parallel fashion, under the Biden rules, a faith-based drug rehabilitation center must admit a beneficiary to its program—which integrates faith with the whole of life—and then adjust its program depending on the religious ideocracies of the beneficiary. A provider can’t do that efficiently, especially when what makes the program successful is each beneficiary’s full participation in an integrated program, including its spiritual aspects.

What the regulations ought to provide is a way for beneficiaries who have a religious objection to be sent to a different program. In the rare instance where there are no non-religiously objectionable programs for a beneficiary, then the establishment clause requires the government to provide an equivalent service. The establishment clause places the duty on the government because the First Amendment runs against the government, not the faith-based provider.

The Trump administration could have been helpful here but failed. A White House Faith-Based Office sets a vision for the initiative and provides focus for the vast and unwieldy executive branch. Trump set up a White House partnership advisor, not an office; did not fill that position until two years into his administration; and then placed that person in the Office of Public Liaison, the unit that coordinates with supportive coalitions and mobilizes voter support. In other words, Trump politicized the initiative.

From that low point, one would think just about anything the Biden administration did would have been an improvement. Yet Biden stumbled over even that low hurdle.

Carl H. Esbeck is the R.B. Price Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Missouri. When John Ashcroft was attorney general in the Bush administration, Professor Esbeck headed the task force to implement the faith-based initiative at the US Department of Justice.

- More from Carl H. Esbeck

Theology

Why Every Day This Week Is Holy

Ruth Jackson

Christians should celebrate from Palm to Easter Sunday—and everything in between.

Stations of the Cross by Saint-Jean-Baptiste au Béguinage

Wikimedia Commons

As a child, my twin and I would often stage elaborate bake-offs during the school holidays. One year, I made an Easter cake with three chocolate crosses and a crown of thorns. I drowned these elements in large pools of jammy blood.

Sure, it was gratuitously gruesome—and I’m not surprised my sister’s saccharine fluffy chick cupcakes were the favored choice. But from an early age, I have shirked the propensity to avoid the grittiness of Easter. To me, its bloodiness is the very reason the Cross brings so much hope.

Many Christians around the world will celebrate Palm Sunday this weekend to commemorate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Some 2,000 years ago, crowds of Jews laid out palm branches on public streets to welcome their “Messiah”—the conquering king who they believed would overthrow the Roman government and liberate them from its hostile occupation.

While many oppressed people today still desperately need this kind of physical deliverance, Jesus’ journey did not end there. Instead, his road to Jerusalem culminated in the Cross, which brought an entirely different kind of liberation.

Palm Sunday marks the start of Holy Week, the days leading up to Jesus’ betrayal, death, and resurrection. It is a period from the ancient church calendar when Christians look forward to the victory of Easter Sunday with joyful anticipation.

But it is also a time of great sorrow—marked by suffering, betrayal, and brokenness. And because of this, it speaks powerfully to those whose countries, relationships, or mental health situations are increasingly unstable. In a world desperately in need of hope, we cannot just brush past the anguish of Holy Week and move straight to the triumph of Easter.

The early days of Holy Week hint at the imminent doom.

Holy Monday (also known as Holy and Great Monday) marks the day Jesus cursed the fig tree for not producing fruit and then overturned the tables in the temple. On the next day, Holy Tuesday, Jesus continued teaching in Jerusalem, challenging the religious leaders, and informing the disciples of his impending crucifixion. The infuriation displayed by the teachers of the law sets the stage for the next few days of Jesus’ life.

Holy Wednesday (also known as Spy Wednesday) is an especially dark day, which refers to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus. Judas’ duplicity would have been immensely painful for Jesus. He was not a detached observer on the periphery but one of Jesus’ core group of disciples—a close friend and traveling companion. This tragedy is deepened when Judas later regrets his decision to assist in Jesus’ death but is unable to reverse it, and so tragically chooses to end his own life.

Yet even in the darkest moments, there is hope. Jesus’ first words from the Cross were “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Perhaps Jesus was assuring his friend (among others) that all was not lost—that no matter how deep our depravity, there is always the promise of transformation.

Some churches celebrate a Maundy Thursday meal together in a re-creation of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. There, through their eating and drinking, Jesus informed his followers that his body would be broken and that his blood would be shed—for them and for many.

Later that evening, in the Garden of Gethsemane, as his death grew closer and many abandoned him, Jesus’ sweat apparently fell like drops of blood (Luke 22:44). Some speculate he may have been suffering from hematohidrosis, a rare medical condition where the capillaries around the sweat glands rupture under extreme distress and trauma.

Good Friday may seem an inappropriate name for a day marked by bloodshed, suffering, and death. But the ostensibly bad achieves the good—as Jesus’ broken body on the cross becomes the source of humanity’s redemption. C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “His death has washed out our sins, and … by dying He disabled death itself.” The cross, which was an instrument of death (and a slow, shameful, brutal one at that), ultimately becomes a symbol of life.

Yet in our attempt to rush from the horror of Good Friday to the joy of Easter Sunday, many of us neglect Holy Saturday, the final day of Holy Week.

Last Easter, I interviewed professor John Swinton, a former psychiatric nurse turned practical theologian, who said that Holy Saturday prevents us from developing a theology of glory—which glosses over the suffering of death and moves straight to the Resurrection. It reminds us that some people are living in dark spaces and that we need to sit with them in their despair, weeping with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).

Holy Saturday prompts us to take suffering seriously. It also assures us that we do not struggle alone. Throughout his life, Jesus suffered pain at every possible level: physical, psychological, and spiritual. While this by no means eliminates our own pain, the biblical picture shows us that whatever we encounter—whether physical sickness, mental health struggles, or spiritual doubt—Jesus has been there. He not only knows about the depths of human emotion, but he has also experienced them.

Many people know the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). However, most English translations of the original Greek do not do this passage justice. Elsewhere, in verses 33 and 38, the same Greek word for “weep” conveys a guttural depth of emotion—which can also be translated “He snorted like an angry horse.” Jesus was not just sorrowful about his friend Lazarus’ death; he was angry because he knew life was not meant to be like this, nor would it be forever.

When we are fragile, lost, and alone, a sugarcoated victory tale does not resonate with our pain. We need a concrete hope that has plumbed the depths of despair, sweat blood, and experienced excruciating death—yet also declares this is not the end of the story.

Friday is good because Easter Sunday is in sight. If Jesus indeed rose from the dead, then death does not have the final word. Holy Week and the events leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion assure us we are loved, we are not alone in our pain, and we are worth rescuing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I suffered a miscarriage—and in that time, Jesus’ nail-scarred hands and bloody body spoke more powerfully to me than ever. And when I later conceived and gave birth to another baby, we named her Eden-Grace to serve as a reminder that loss is not the end of our story. No matter how broken our lives are now, we need never lose the hope of God’s promised restoration.

In J. R. R Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the hobbit Samwise Gamgee asks Gandalf, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” For us, the answer is yes. Jesus’ resurrection helps us make sense of the Cross, but it also provides a way out of our suffering. That is, it points to a future reality with no more pain when everything sad will come untrue.

Ruth Jackson is host of the Unapologetic podcast, is a producer and presenter for Premier Unbelievable, and cohosts The CS Lewis Podcast with professor Alister McGrath.

- More from Ruth Jackson

Church Life

Make the Internet Modest Again

Hannah Anderson

We gained an audience but overexposed our souls.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

Ten years ago, I published my first book. Like many of my peers, my work draws from personal experience and uses elements of memoir. After all, I became a writer in the heyday of confessional blogging when Glennon Doyle and Jen Hatmaker were writing from their kitchen tables about the struggles of domestic life and womanhood. The first blog I ever read described the pain of childbirth in all its gory detail.

But that openness is nothing compared to the kind of self-exposure that today’s platforms demand. As blogs gave way to social media, content became both more staged and, ironically, more intimate. Instead of writing from the kitchen table, influencers go live from their kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms. Nothing is off-limits. Audiences are invited to ride the dramatic arc of personal relationship, sexual experience, and religious doubt. Together, we celebrate milestones in the lives of children we don’t even know.

In publishing, the pressure to expose one’s personal life is rooted in the author’s need to drive sales through online presence and platform—what has been deemed the “personal brand.” Writer Jen Pollock Michel, whose career mirrors mine, recently confessed that she’s considering stepping back, not from writing but from book publishing, because “there are fewer and fewer ways to publicize a book that don’t look self-promotional.” All of this makes for a deeply immodest publishing culture—one in which self-exposure is deemed a virtue.

To name authorial self-promotion as a problem of modesty may strike you as misplaced. It’s gimmicky, to be sure, maybe even cringe as the kids say, but immodest? Part of the reason I think of it in terms of modesty is because gaining a following in this noisy, crowded space requires catching readers’ attention. And one sure way to do that is by exposing yourself. This frame of reference is also challenging because we often misunderstand modesty, especially in spaces shaped by purity culture.

At best, it is a kind of humble self-deprecation (which social media could use more of); at worst, it’s a way to shame women’s bodies. But when we define modesty in these terms, we miss the ways in which it could help us enforce and hold healthy online boundaries.

After all, modesty isn’t a question of what is hidden but from whom something is hidden. In this way, modesty is deeply related to intimacy, which Christian ethicist and Duke Divinity professor Luke Bretherton suggests is the basic building block of human community. In A Primer in Christian Ethics, he presents intimacy as the ability to come near each other in vulnerability and trust. While intimacy includes sex, it is more than this. It is the means by which we open ourselves to the possibility of bonding with others and pursue the mutual dependence necessary to flourishing.

But this also makes intimacy risky—because in the same way that intimacy allows us to bond, it also opens us to exploitation. When we expose ourselves, we trust that others will not take advantage of us and will honor the sacredness of what we share. When others let down their guard and unveil themselves to us, we must not abuse their trust. We must hold faith with each other. Ideally, unspoken norms and communal covenants protect such vulnerability, but the ideal is not reality. Unspoken norms are no longer even norms. Covenants are left unenforced while communities turn a blind eye to abuse.

East of Eden, we must evaluate who is trustworthy and who is not. We must learn with whom we can become vulnerable. To whom can we turn the soft undersides of our bellies? Who will honor our sacredness? The relationship between intimacy, vulnerability, and trust lies at the heart of modesty and is why it is so necessary to online engagement. Modesty—whether physical, emotional, or spiritual—recognizes the inherent risk of nakedness in a world set on desecration and covers us just as God covered the man and woman in the garden (Gen. 3:21). We still have the choice to unveil ourselves, but unveiling is dependent, in part, on context and relationship.

This principle explains why the sexual passion of Song of Songs is modest and also why the book is written in poetry—why it is veiled. The vulnerability of the lovers is sacred because of its defenselessness, because of its freedom. As such, it must be honored and protected by the community around it. This includes shielding it from voyeurs.

Alternatively, some places and relationships preclude intimacy—not because unveiling oneself is inherently wrong but because the space or people cannot be trusted to honor us. They will either abuse or disdain the sacredness of our disclosure. Some spaces, like social media, are inherently precarious. The anxiety and uncertainty we feel in them is not about the thought of opening ourselves so much as our instinctual understanding that we are deeply unsafe when we do.

Modesty is also why readers will never get every detail of my life or process—why I refuse to expose certain parts of myself online or in writing. One of the earliest reviews of my first book suggested that I wasn’t telling the reader everything. The critique amounted to this: The insights in my writing suggested a certain amount of life experience and even suffering. So, the reviewer wondered, where had those insights come from? What was I not sharing? Everything. And nothing.

In much the same way that I clothe my body, I also clothe my words. The shape of my heart is still discernible, but even as readers can trace its contours, I won’t expose its flesh. And just as I cover physical wounds to prevent infection, I won’t expose the wounds of my soul until they are healed. I make no apology for this. Some things are too sacred for public consumption, no matter how many books they sell. Our pain, grief, and even joy must be set apart and made holy because they are so vulnerable.

Sometimes, too, we choose to veil the most beautiful parts of ourselves to preserve them for only those who can perceive their value. My life has changed a lot in ten years. I’m no longer running after little ones. I don’t blog anymore. I still live in the same place, but the people who live there with me have changed. I don’t garden as much, and my house is quieter than it’s ever been. I’m part of a local church but not in leadership. I’ve returned to school. I probably need to update my bio.

Some of these changes I’ve shared with readers, and others—especially the ones that involved loss and grief—I’ve kept to myself, choosing to honor their sacredness. When necessary, I’ve stepped away from social media for extended seasons of cocooning while parts of me recreate in private.

I’ve often wondered what we owe each other in this limitless age. Without the boundaries of space, time, and embodied relationship, how do I know whom I belong to? How do I know whom I can trust? At times, I’ve unveiled myself in innocence only to have my openheartedness met by a knife. But instead of protecting myself by hardening my heart, I’m choosing modesty. I’m choosing to actively shield the soft parts of myself so that they can remain tender, so that I can remain myself. Constantly exposing ourselves online desensitizes us, making it difficult to honor the sacredness of our lives.

Modesty may run counter to prevailing wisdom, but I believe it works for the good of my soul. In the words of Mark 8:36–38, I find myself asking, What will a woman give in exchange for her soul? If she gained the whole world and sold out all her books and won every award and made the New York Times, what would it profit her?

Our stories and souls are far too sacred to sell to the highest bidder. They hold wisdom, yes, but they also hold people and realities too holy to be named in common places. Insofar as we can share what we’ve learned with the world, we must, but everything else is just details—details that, once revealed, will not change the life of the reader but whose telling would definitely change mine.

Hannah Anderson is the author of Made for More, All That’s Good, and Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul.

Theology

Fasting from Food in a Land of Plenty

Jeanne Whitlock

Abstaining from eating confronts the cultural lies we believe about our bodies.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / Getty / WikiMedia Commons

I stood frozen in the cereal aisle. On either side of me were thousands of boxes and bags of breakfast grains stretched out row after row, in scores of varieties: Vitamin fortified! Extra marshmallows! Cinnamon clusters with organic wheat germ for twice your daily fiber!

For the past four and a half years, I’d been living in another country, limited to the street of local food vendors near my house. I’d walk up and down the market past wriggling eels in gallon buckets, steaming dumplings from a little chrome cart, and gritty bundles of bok choy heaped on a card table. I’d buy only what I could fit in my bags and carry back home on foot. Now, just after moving back to America, I was paralyzed by the excess surrounding me at my local grocery store.

A land of plenty is a strange place to fast from food. And not just because many of us have not known of fasting by necessity, but also because of our underlying cultural assumptions.

On one hand, we embrace the indulgence of hedonism—what the body wants, it must have. We enthrone desire as the highest good, give in to every craving, and let it enslave us. And as a rule, our pleasures are designed for excess. Just as streaming companies encourage binging and smartphones aim for addiction, a lot of what we eat is scientifically engineered to addict us. It’s hard to rightly order our appetites when they have been manipulated by global food conglomerates that profit from excess.

On the other hand, we embrace a modern-day iteration of Gnosticism. Strongly influenced by Platonic and dualist philosophies, we split the physical from the spiritual in a false dichotomy. We elevate the supernatural realm as purer and truer than the corporeal—which we often regard as dirty or even sinful. We diet to excess—patterned after social influencers. For many, the prospect of fasting carries with it the baggage of shame and religious pride, and it can trigger those struggling with disordered eating.

It would be one thing if these lies were only promoted by our culture, but sadly they can also show up in our churches.

A culture of materialism or hedonism in church can look, for example, like a relentless pursuit of higher attendance and a bigger budget to buy nicer facilities. I remember one missionary friend walking into my megachurch auditorium and growing angry. Surveying our gleaming screens, padded seats, and luscious flower arrangements, he said, “The church we planted had to raise money for folding chairs. We’ve met in a basement for 20 years. What does all this tell people about the cross of Christ?”

There is also a myriad of ways the church implies, sometimes accidentally, that our flesh is a problem and that our spirits are the real deal. This might entail judging members who take anti-depressants for their lack of faith—or an elder board that won’t fund a mission to dig wells overseas unless they are assured the gospel will be presented at the same time. Churchy Gnosticism makes bodies problematic, or at the very least inferior to whatever we mean by souls.

These two opposing lies—which lead us to either exalt or neglect our bodies—profoundly inform our habits around food. And for Christians, the spiritual discipline of fasting offers a powerful third way, and it speaks truth against our favorite lies about our bodies.

Ever since stumbling in, and out, of Anglicanism years ago, I’ve given up some creative things for Lent: scrolling Instagram, church gatherings, using my phone after 5 p.m., or even one year, adding unnecessary comments to conversations. Ever the individualists, we like to invent bespoke abstentions. And although there’s no doubt these can serve useful purposes in our lives with God, I keep returning to fasting from food in the context of community because of the way it targets our cultural lies.

Food fasting has been considered a traditional Christian habit throughout time and around the world. On John Mark Comer’s podcast, one Ethiopian guest described how she grew up fasting with her Christian community from sunup to sundown for 50 days. Another guest joyfully described the keen awareness of the Spirit he usually gets on the 14th day of a fast.

That sounds so cool, but I am not there yet. When it comes to food fasting, I’m still a beginner—still figuring out how to prayerfully skip three meals with any sort of regularity. And as I’m trying to put it into practice, I’m also looking to learn from others about the spiritual purpose of the habit.

Nineteenth-century missionary Hudson Taylor learned much about fasting from the Shansi Chinese believers. “Since it makes one feel weak and poorly,” Taylor observed, fasting “is really a Divinely appointed means of grace. Perhaps the greatest hindrance to our work is our own imagined strength. In fasting we learn what poor, weak creatures we are, dependent on a meal of meat for the little strength which we are so apt to lean upon.” It seems God loves to fill the weakness fasting reveals in us.

I’m also discovering that self-denial in our eating can develop our muscles for heavenly battle. As Robert Moll says, the “habit of denial strengthens our ability to take up the cross as even our very bodies are molded into the likeness of Christ.” I’ve noticed that when I’m fasting, I’m able to resist my pet temptations more robustly. It reminds me of being back in college when I’d lift leg weights in the gym so that I could run faster and kick harder on the soccer field.

Even Jesus experienced physical abstinence as a way to spiritual strength. After the Spirit led him to fast for 40 days, bathing in his Father’s affirmation, Jesus was ready to meet the Devil in the desert.

Food fasting can also make us aware of our poor eating habits as a society. Many of us scarf dinner alone in front of a show or grab fast food between one thing and the next in our busy schedules. We overindulge and we throw out a lot. For what I have eaten, and left uneaten, I feel truly sorry.

After all, what does it matter if I swear off excess only to leave a brother or sister in need empty? What would it look like to fast not only for the right ordering of my body and spirit with God but for the just practices of my neighborhood?

Our gluttony and our unhealthy self-deprivations both occur in an age of real hunger. One in 8 Americans experience food insecurity—in other words, they don’t have enough money to eat as much as they need. The number of hungry humans that surround overstuffed food stores grieves me. In the world’s wealthiest country, some people still starve.

Many believers have used Lent or other fasts to align themselves with the hungry—to raise awareness or money for the poor, and to remember to pray for those in need. Some friends of mine spent one Lent eating nothing but rice and beans in solidarity with those who have no other options. Every time we feel our stomachs grumble, our hunger can serve as a Post-it note reminding us to pray for those in need.

Communal, poverty-aligned fasting can move us beyond our egocentric view—seeing it as an individual spiritual practice—and open our eyes to the experiences of all those outside our bubble. Far from indicting it as performative, the prophet Isaiah praises the kind of fast wherein we “free those who are wrongly imprisoned … share [our] food with the hungry and give shelter to the homeless” (Is. 58:6–7).

As far as my personal experience of fasting, it varies wildly. I never know how holy hunger is going to affect me. Sometimes my body feels like a clear vessel overflowing with the Holy Spirit. I can feel God’s love for his world pulsing out in all directions; I get clarity and breakthroughs, and my prayers seem to “availeth much” (James 5:16, KJV). Other times when I fast, I just get cranky—I obsess over the food I’m missing, get a headache, and feel like everything is stupid.

But whether I feel the spiritual significance or not doesn’t change the value of the fast. It’s one of those disciplines by which, as Richard Foster points out in his classic book Celebration of Discipline, we carve out a dedicated space (the body) and a dedicated time (say, Wednesdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) for God, into which he is welcome to enter. While my motives for fasting matter, I don’t have to get all my sanctification ducks in a row to do it.

My fasts are all over the place, lopsided in motivation, sometimes—ahem—shorter than intended, and never that impressive. When I offer my body to God with fasting, it’s a messy gift, as if a toddler grabbed some crayons, scribbled a picture, and thrust it into her dad’s hands. Fasting says, Here! Here are my addictions and dependencies, my pleasures and cravings, my weakness, and what little strength I have. Do you want it? And he does!

With our fasting, God undertakes to free us from the cruelty of asceticism and the paralysis of indulgence. Fasting attacks both my inner hedonist and my inner dualist, who snobbishly dismiss the material world as less important than the spiritual realm. As we offer our bodies as living sacrifices, God does what neither hedonism nor Gnosticism can do: He values our bodies and our bodily self-control. And he calls our physical sacrifice holy.

Fasting both renews our awareness of our bodies’ spiritual significance and honors our bodies as lovingly crafted, lavishly supplied, sacred spaces to rendezvous with God.

God doesn’t see our bodies as secondary or irrelevant. From the moment God mixes dust with divine breath to form Adam, the Bible presents humans as integrated, holistic selves. Jesus came as the Word made flesh. He fed empty stomachs and he preached sermons. He healed physical sickness and he forgave sins. The Messiah treated every part of his fellow human beings as significant.

Likewise, God intends for our bodies and spirits to be inextricably braided together. Fasting rejoins our spirits and our bodies, the pneuma and the soma. With a fast, we put God back in charge of our desires and ask him to be better than whatever we’re craving. We humbly ask that his kingdom reign in our bodies.

Graciously, he also reveals the communal nature of our attitudes and actions around eating, and he invites us to “act justly” (Mic. 6:8) when it comes to food. God cherishes human bodies, all made in his image. They are part of his kingdom plan. He cares about our food: what we do and do not eat, and why, and with whom. He cares about our bellies and our grief—both the meal and the hungry man on the sidewalk. Not only that, but his promise of redemption will one day transform it all.

To one newly repatriated American, overwhelmed in the cereal aisle, all that is very good news—that’s the gospel.

Jeannie Whitlock is a freelance journalist and poet in the Chicago suburbs who writes about holy embodiment in all its diverse ramifications.

- More from Jeanne Whitlock

Share

An accurate picture of Artemis

Slogan and response

Share

Share

Share

Share

A source of relief for a dry land

A community-led program

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share